Elite

and
Popular
Culture

Mark Knights
 Links to other themes
• Last term’s discussion of the social order
(bonds and tensions; the rise of middling
groups)
• The role of print – expensive and cheap forms
• And looking ahead to:
• Witches on Thursday
• and after reading week: power and authority,
popular politics, rebellion
 Lecture structure
• Set out what the terms
‘popular’, ‘elite’ and
‘culture’ mean (or have
meant)
• How far were there distinct
spheres?
• Sites and points of overlap
 What is ‘culture’?
• Peter Burke, What is Cultural History? (2004)
• Narrow definition: clothing, artworks, literature,
performances (Renaissance – Jacob Burkhardt, Die
Kultur der Renaissance in Italien 1860)
• but also broader definition building on older interest in
Folk culture – romanticism: beliefs/ideologies,
customs, rituals, gender-relations. Sociological
influence. Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process (1939).
• 1960s and 1970s ‘cultural history from below’; Raphael
Samuel, ‘History workshop’; influence of sociology and
anthropology eg Natalie Zemon Davis – Martin Guerre;
interest in rituals and violence.
 Elite culture
• different kinds of elites: monarch/aristocracy;
urban elites; economic and intellectual elites
• What about a middling sort? Were the
bourgeoisie part of elite culture?
• centres of patronage, culture but also sites of
competition/negotiation: court, university, law
courts, armed forces, houses and estates.
 The Château de Brissac
is a C17th French
Dutch noble officer by Daniel Mytens
château in the commune
of Brissac-Quincé
• interest in lineage,
prestige; conspicuous
consumption; dissociation
from manual labour/trade;
humanist education
• “The civilising process” (N.
Elias 1939) – refinement of
manners and etiquette as
a process of social
distinction – process of
cultural integration or Portrait by Frans Pourbus the Younger, depicting
exclusion? the union of Charles of Arenberg and Anne of
Croÿ, members of two of the most ancient and
powerful houses among the Belgian nobility
Coffee house, c.1700
 Popular Culture
• Who are the ‘people’?
• ‘The people’ encompassed great differences of wealth
and education; urban/rural; gender and age
• difficulty of studying popular culture at its lowest level:
‘an elusive quarry’ (P. Burke)
• oblique access through a range of (mostly indirect)
legal, administrative, literary and visual records
• difficulties of looking at popular culture through elite
sources, oral culture through written/printed sources
Jan Havicksz. Steen (Dutch, 1625–1679). Gamblers Quarreling, ca. 1665
Bruegel
 Approaches
• low culture vs high culture?
• Marxist: elite vs popular/plebeian (eg. E P Thompson); ‘cultural
hegemony’
• Robert Muchembled and Peter Burke (both 1978) tends to divide
culture into two basic forms: "elite" and "popular" cultures which
clash repeatedly until, Muchembled claimed, an older, popular
culture, is "vanquished" by the power of social elites
• Are there popular cultures? Sub-cultures? Barry Reay (Popular
Cultures in England 1550-1750 (1998): defines ‘popular cultures’ as
‘widely held and commonly expressed thoughts and actions’, the
plural of cultures representing ‘the subcultural splinterings (or
segmentation) of locality, age, gender, religion, and class’
• growing separation – withdrawal of elites; triumph of Lent over
charivari/carnival
 Was carnival a ‘safety valve’ tolerated by the elite [Claude de
Rubys: ‘it is sometimes expedient to allow the people to play the
fool and make merry lest by holding them in with too great a
rigour, we put them in despair’] or expressions of popular
culture that could not be contained by the elite?
 Separate spheres?
• both Protestant and Catholic authorities target aspects of
popular culture
• Witchcraft – removed from statute book in France 1682;
Prussia 1714; GB 1736
• NB these often post-dated end of witch craze; the last
conviction in England was 1712. Judicial scepticism.
 Law as an instrument of suppression?

• Marxist tradition
• Property laws inflicting
very high penalties
including death
• ‘Bloody Code’. E P
Thompson, Whigs and
Hunters re the Black
Act 1723 to deal with
'wicked and evil-
disposed men going
armed in disguise‘,
pillaging the royal
forest of deer
• Defence of popular
customs – Andy Wood
 P. Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978),
proposed the ‘great’ and ‘little traditions’: the elites participate
in both, the majority have only the little tradition

Montacute House, Somersert (Edward Phelips), ‘Skimmington’, c.1598-1601

 Agents and Sites of overlap
• Were the gentry and artisans types of cultural
brokers?
• streets, markets, but esp. public houses (inns,
alehouses, taverns)
 Where are the points of overlap?
• Print
• C. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms (first English
ed. 1980), emphasised circularity and appropriation of
culture between different groups eg. the heretical
miller Menocchio
• => new focus on transmission, exchange within a more
unified culture rather than two separate spheres (see
work of R. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk:
Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation; R.
Chartier)
• Barry Reay (1998): plurality of overlapping cultures
Erhard Schön (attributed), “Demon Playing
Monk (Lutheran) Bagpipe,” c. 1535 Anti-papal satire
 Elite display as street theatre
Joyeuse entrée
• The crowds ‘read’ the symbolism
Giovanni Battista Cimaroli - The Piazza San Marco with
the Populace chasing Bulls 1740
 Cheap Print: the
ballad
• Popular, cheap forms of print:
almanacs; chapbooks; ballads
• Pepys (1633-1703) collection of
over 1,800 ballads
• mentions in his diary admiring and
acquiring ballads in the 1660s
• Bought collection of John Selden
• other gentry collectors was Robert
Harley whose expanded collection
became known as the Roxburghe
Ballads (1,500 ballads); Anthony
Wood.
• Ballads reflect
popular
culture;
• The Poor
Man’s
Complaint
• but do they
also seek to
control it?
• Anything for a
quiet life
• Punish’d
Atheist